Comic Reading Website

Final Project for CSS326-Database Programming, a course at SIIT.

This project is a website to demonstrate the CRUD APIs for a web application using MySQL Database. The website is a comic reading website where users can login and enjoy comic books online. The website is created using React Frontend, NodeJS Backend, and MysqlDB.

To setup the project:

1. Pull the repository onto your local machine.
2. Create a new Database Schema in MySQL using your preferred tool (MySQL Workbench, phpMyAdmin, etc.) and import sql file comic_reading.sql into it.
3. (Optional) Create a new user for this database with at least the permissions to SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, EXECUTE.
4. Edit the .env file in the root folder which would look like this

HOST =              #db server host address
USERNAME =          #db username
PASSWORD =          #db password
DATABASE =          #database name
PASS_AES_KEY =      #Password for encryption

Note: The PASS_AES_KEY is the password used in encrypting the password of website users which can be set to any string.

5. To run the website, open a terminal inside the root folder and use command

node app.js

This would start up the backend application on port 3000.

Note: If you want to use another port, please edit the port variable inside app.js at the root folder as well as the .env file of the frontend which is located at ./commicweb-app 2/.env

6. Lastly, open another terminal inside commicweb-app 2 folder and use command

npm start

Likewise, the frontend port by default is set to 5173 which you can edit at ./ commicweb-app 2/.env

7. To fully utilize the website, register a new user then go into MySQL Database and add the user_id from the user table to the admin table to turn any user into an admin. Admins can access a new separated admin page where they can add new books, edit existing books, and delete any books.

Additional Information: You can import the file Comic Website API.postman_collection.json into postman to try out just the backend portion alone.